The other thing that’s useful for me is this notion of the absolute versus the relative:if we walk out and it’s a beautiful morning, it’s only a beautiful morning because we don’t have a broken leg or hemorrhoids or something.
GEORGE SAUNDERSIf a writer understands his work as something that originates with him but then, with any luck, gets away from him, then what he needs is someone who can grasp the potential of the piece and lead him to that higher ground.
More George Saunders Quotes
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Positive human action is not only possible, but pervasive; human beings can improve and choose light and so on. And this is all happening.
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My stories, I can understand them as a little toy that you wind up and you put it on the floor and it just goes under the coach. That I get. Beyond that, I’m a little lost.
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You can say you’re a liberal and everybody laughs and it’s a good time.
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Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.
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What’s really baffling to me is the way that the technology has risen up to help us become more materialistic.
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You don’t want to be that parent – the one who dresses his kid in a cloth sack when all the other kids are in Armani cloth sacks – especially in a time like ours, when materialism is not only rampant and ascendant but is fast becoming the only game in town.
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Based on the experience of my life, which I have not exactly hit out of the park, I tend to agree with that thing about, If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. And would go even further to: Even if it is broke, leave it alone, you’ll probably make it worse.
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Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we’re someone else, disrupting the delusion that we’re permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we’re saved!) other people are real again, and we’re fond of them.
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That’s the only way that I can figure out how to live, is to say, “Well, I don’t know what this adds up to, but I can do the best I can.”
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If you’re going to make an emotional connection with somebody, whether it’s in the story or in the world, there’s a certain amount of self-acceptance that is required.
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Chekhov – shall I be blunt? – is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.
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When you talk about a reader being emotionally moved, a feeling of empathy, I think that comes out of that line-by-line respect for reader. That’s actually where it all comes from.
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Early on, a story’s meaning and rationale seem pretty obvious, but then, as I write it, I realize that I know the meaning/rationale too well, which means that the reader will also know it – and so things have to be ramped up.
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When I wrote that [Donald] Trump piece, I had this uncomfortable experience of sensing a lot of things that were nascent, that I couldn’t quite articulate. And one of them was this move toward anti-intellectualism. An anti-love move, even.
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Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.
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